Wednesday, October 26, 2011

One Direction's Cyber Punk

For plans for the One Direction Paper Dolls please see at the bottom of the page. Plans for all 5 dolls are down there!

One Direction is the band that came out of last year's X-Factor (a bit of background for anyone who's not in the UK). They're close to releasing their first album, and to stoke up the interest their 'people' (record company, management or whatever) have been playing an online game with fans.

The character 1DCyberPunk was introduced a couple of weeks ago through the main One Direction site. She's supposedly stolen their laptop, and will release images and more as fans complete a set of challenges. For example solving a cryptic clue to get an exclusive pic, getting a One Direction term trending on Twitter, or making a paper model of the band members.

(One Direction Paper Dolls - To download the templates, go to the 1DCP site, and then go to task 4 to see the dolls link (see pic above). Use the arrows on the bottom to navigate to task 4. Good luck, Tinkers!)

(OK then - Easter 2012 - in response to the comments on the blog I've now taken screenshots and here are the plans for all 5 dolls. Be creative and enjoy yourselves!)

Harry Styles Paper Doll

Liam Payne Paper Doll

Louis Tomlinson Paper Doll

Niall Horan Paper Doll

Zayn Malik Paper Doll

(Slight update - 16-11-11 - fans have even made stop-motion films of the dolls)

(End of update)

The main action's happening through Twitter, and I think it says a lot about both how the young are using media, and how to engage through social media.

1 - Teens get Twitter. It's easy to do, and it's free (as a marginal cost). A friend recently got a smartphone on a contract with unlimited internet, unlimited texts & 100 minutes of talk time for £15 a month. Blimey. Twitter is perfect for kids to communicate, and these days so many of their heroes are on twitter. In the case of One Direction the band is on Twitter (twitter is promoted more prominently than Facebook on their site) and the 5 individual members are on too and active users. Furthermore, bands like One Direction are teaching their fans how to be expert Twitter users. I read a book once where a female journalist said that she'd learnt how to organise people by planning trips to see David Cassidy when she was younger... This is similar.

2 - Brands can use Twitter for engagement, but only when they are engaging in the first place. Twitter wasn't used to launch the band, TV was. But Twitter is used to keep the excitement and interest high. In this case it's 5 teenagers, so there's no shortage of news to spread about them - what they're up to, where they've been, what they want for their birthdays, what they're watching on TV. The challenge with brands on twitter is to be endlessly interesting - not how they can spend money to promote things that people probably aren't that interested in (Columbus are using the promoted trend today to promote a video that's 5 months old)

Hats off to whoever's running the One Direction marketing. I'd love to see some case studies when they've shown that if you get it right kids do still buy music!